


my beating heart wanted more

by alexanger



Series: i forget sometimes just how to breathe [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Hurt No Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-03 03:22:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11523486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexanger/pseuds/alexanger
Summary: Words pop into his head, a gentle phrase in a soothing rhythm,he must find a place to be still,quiet and unobtrusive.





	my beating heart wanted more

The scent of lilies fills his nose. To Thomas they’re reminiscent of the stench of urine or an emergency room toilet, the stamens rusty like blood. They cover the casket and flood the chapel. The lilies are blown wide, open like horrible alien mouths, and someone should have plucked the stamens - they have a tendency to drop their pollen, to mark whatever they touch, dye things a nasty bile orange. Thomas can see orange dusting on the lower petals of the lilies. Voices murmur somewhere behind him and a choir hums something in a minor key. There’s a clash, just for a moment, before they settle into harmony.

He can taste the scent of the lilies. 

James lies still and silent. He’s ashen, grey, fading like old blooms, gone crinkled and crackly around the edges. 

The casket is full of lilies. James is a lily. His face is blown petals. The rushing and crashing of an ocean sounds somewhere and the chapel doors creak behind him. He knows if he turns, he’ll see them bowing inward, struggling to hold back the flood. It’s only a matter of time before the doors are swept away; he understands, in the same way he’s certain of the sunrise or of his own heartbeat, that they won’t hold forever. He counts his breaths, counts his heartbeats, counts the petals on the lilies. James doesn’t move and that isn’t even the worst part. Thomas will never hear his voice again and that isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is that there was so much time and James chose to give it up. The worst part is that he chose to leave Thomas behind.

“You should have waited for me,” he murmurs.

James’ eyes jerk open.

There’s the sound of snapping wood and then a flood of lilies, fluid and alive, lapping at his ankles, his knees, his thighs, rising past his waist. The flood bears down on his chest. He barely has time to open his mouth and suck in a breath before he goes under. Lilies fill his vision and tumble into Thomas’s mouth and cascade down his throat and he’s sputtering, drowning in lilies, the urine stench and rusty stamens choking him. He can’t breathe. It’s all lilies inside him, through his lungs, burning in his stomach, filling his diaphragm. 

“Lilies,” Thomas gasps, jerking his numb legs. The chair he fell asleep in is tiny and his back is aching. It cracks in three places and his shoulder does too and then his neck creaks and he’s awake, his tongue dry and foul tasting in his mouth.

“What about ‘em?” James says.

“I hate them,” says Thomas.

James hums. He idly picks at the tape holding his IV in place. “Yeah,” he says, sounding utterly unsurprised. “Me too.”

“Can’t stand the way they smell,” says Thomas.

“Yeah.”

“Like piss,” Thomas says. “No lilies.”

“At the funeral?” James asks.

“Yeah.”

“Cool.”

“Okay.”

James pulls hard enough on the tape that it yanks his IV a little way out. He shrugs and pulls it all the way out of his hand, then slaps his other hand on top of the puncture wound and says, “let’s bust.”

“Are you allowed to go yet?” Thomas pauses, then adds, “I don’t think you’re supposed to take those out by yourself.”

“Don’t care. I’m done.” James doesn’t seem to notice the blood spilling down his hand in a small trickle. Thomas watches it and feels a lump in his throat. 

“At least let them bandage you,” Thomas says.

James doesn’t say anything. He looks blankly at the blood trickling down his hand.

Thomas can’t tear his eyes away. He watches too, his mind stuck on lilies. He thinks of the hideous gaping mouths of lilies and the way they reek. He thinks of the rusty stamens, how the dark ones almost look like blood.

He thinks of James lying ashen and still and cold in a casket, surrounded by white flowers.

Fucking lilies.

 

* * *

 

Thomas twists his tangle between his hands so violently that it pops loose in two places and a joint flies off across the room. It comes to rest underneath the chair he’s sitting across from.

“Do you mind, um, passing that back?” he asks.

“Sure,” says George. He leans down with a soft grunt, hunts about for the piece, and manages to snag it with the tips of his fingers. Holding it out to Thomas, he says, “here.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles. “Why couldn’t I see Martha instead?”

“Conflict of interest. She sees James regularly and can’t see partners of her patients. So, here I am.” George gives Thomas an encouraging smile. There’s an air of strength about him. He seems firm and steady - not like a wall, impersonal and unyielding, but more like a hug, the kind that squeezes the air from your lungs. Thomas finds himself feeling wary of that steadiness.

“So you and Martha are both therapists. You married?” asks Thomas.

“Yes. She’s the psychologist - I’m just a counselor. Little bit of a difference. I come from a different background,” George tells him. “I changed tracks from youth work. If you want to know more about my methods or background I’m always happy to expand. I know that makes some people feel more comfortable.”

“Cool,” says Thomas.

“Tell me more about your experience with James this weekend,” George prompts.

“How old are you?” Thomas asks instead.

“Sixteen,” he answers immediately. It’s deadpan, but Thomas catches the joke, and he finds himself warming up a little.

“I feel like that’s unethical in some way,” says Thomas.

George grins at him. “It’s okay. I turn seventeen next week and they put another sticker on my pretend degree.”

“Comforting,” Thomas says, grinning back at him.

“Isn’t it?” George tosses his pad of paper onto the desk next to him and crosses one leg over the other. “You seem reluctant to talk about things, Thomas.”

“Well, yeah,” he says.

“Can you tell me why that is?”

“No offense,” says Thomas, “but like … I literally  _ just  _ met you, and this is super heavy stuff.”

“I understand,” says George.

“Do you really, though?” Thomas asks.

George hums. “Not your exact situation, no.”

“But you’ve heard it all before?”

“That makes this sound, you know, pedestrian,” says George. “Boring, almost. Like the same things happen over and over. The thing is, even if this kind of thing happens a lot, even if I hear a lot about it, that doesn’t change the effect this is having on you. I hear about suicide attempts often, both from the perspective of the survivor and of loved ones. It’s always different and it’s always difficult. That’s the part that I understand.”

“Do you hear about it from, you know - do you hear about the people who didn’t survive?”

“I do,” says George.

“Does it make you sad?”

He fiddles with his pen for a moment and says, “always. The loss of a life is a terrible thing.”

“Not every death is a loss, though,” says Thomas.

“Do you want to tell me what you mean by that?”

For a long moment, Thomas is silent. “I don’t know what I meant by that,” he says finally. “It just - slipped out.”

“I find talking about these little slips can often lead to interesting places,” George tells him.

“I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“That’s alright,” says George. “Tell me about James, then. Is that who you were sitting with in the waiting room?”

“Yeah.” Thomas grins but it’s strained, closer to a grimace. “Can’t trust him home alone right now. I’m actually not happy about being stuck in here without him.”

“What do you think might happen?”

“He could run into traffic or just … leave. Go home.”

“Is there anything dangerous at home?”

Thomas kicks his backpack, which is sitting on the floor next to his foot. “All his meds are in here. He says I can trust him, but better safe than sorry, you know?”

“So you just carry them around with you?” he asks.

“I give him every dose,” says Thomas. “I have a schedule on my phone and it lets me know but I don’t even need to look at it. He gets meds at nine AM, three PM, and then at ten, just before we go to bed. I give him his injections once a week.” He pauses, then says, “they wouldn’t let him have his binder in the ER. I think that was the worst part. They caught him taking out his IV and they put it back in and they told him he couldn’t have his binder and he was just - terrified that someone would see him like that. Sometimes he gets upset even around me when he isn’t wearing it and like, I’ve seen  _ everything. _ They took it away from him and he went on this, like, tirade about trans health rights and they wouldn’t listen. It was really scary watching him lose it. He lost it the night before and then he lost it again and I can’t see him like that. He was begging and crying and he doesn’t  _ do  _ that, he doesn’t lose control like that, he’s so  _ tight  _ and solid and they just … they just wouldn’t give him his fucking binder. Not until I started getting upset. It took so much distress for them to just  _ listen _ to us.”

“They tend to be very rigid in emergency rooms,” says George.

“Agree with me, please,” Thomas mumbles.

“It’s terrible,” George says immediately.

“I don’t need therapy,” says Thomas, and he bursts into furious tears.

George, to his credit, doesn’t say anything until Thomas is done.

 

* * *

 

“Give me a number,” says Thomas, lying beside James in bed.

James grimaces. “Pain is a six. Mood is two.”

“Remind me which way the mood scale goes.”

“Ten is happy,” James says. “One is please grant me the sweet release of death.”

Thomas reaches over and squeezes his hand. “At least it’s not a one.”

“Yeah.” There’s a long moment of silence, and then James says, “I wish you’d just let me do it.”

“Wasn’t enough to kill you, Jester. Just to make you even sicker. That’s what the doctor told us, remember?”

“Still. It would have worked eventually.” James idly kicks one heel against the toes of his other foot. Thomas considers asking him to stop - the motion is shaking the bed a little and he’s hypersensitive, every stimulus grinding against his brain. It feels the same as stepping barefoot on a thin layer of sand spread over a rock, that peculiar grit and slide. He thinks of the ocean and the way it might feel to just walk into the water and swim away. He’s so  _ far  _ from the ocean and he misses the smell of it.

Thomas thinks of drowning and thinks of lilies and watches James kick his feet and wonders how long it will take for those thin legs to tire. It can’t be long, he reasons. James is frail and his legs aren’t made for that kind of motion.

But it goes on and on, that kicking. James is stubborn; Thomas knows far too well the flare of his nostrils and the adamant set of his jaw and the way he digs in his heels when they argue. It doesn’t surprise him that James would continue his kicking far beyond the limits of his legs, even at the cost of his mobility tomorrow.

“Please stop,” he says finally.

James kicks a few more times.

Thomas gets up and leaves the room. He knows if he stays he’ll yell or throw a fit or something, and that it won’t help. He can feel his breath hitching the way it does when a meltdown is approaching and he flaps hard, savouring the numbness in his fingertips and the snap of his wrists. It’s a fluid, easy motion, as natural as breathing. It helps to calm his breathing a little, but the meltdown is still there, lurking in the corners of his brain.

Things used to be simple.

He goes out onto the balcony. The weather is getting colder and the tomatoes have stopped blooming. Thomas has no idea what to do with the plants after they stop producing. Does he cull them? Does he cut them down? Does he leave them over winter, or bring them inside? He pulls out his phone, opens his browser, and immediately forgets what he was going to google.

It’s chilly. He should have grabbed his hoodie. Thomas hunts through his pockets for a fidget and finds a tiny plush toy but the sensation on his fingers is wrong and he tucks it away again. More flapping it is, then.

Words pop into his head, a gentle phrase in a soothing rhythm,  _ he must find a place to be still, _ quiet and unobtrusive. It aches a little. He wants his heart to quiet.

Things used to be so much  _ easier. _ Thomas can’t remember the last fight they had before they started dating - James seems far more argumentative now, ready at the slightest provocation to escalate a conversation into verbal sparring. He wonders if it’s him or the meds or the illness or the recent attempt or something else, some chemical fuckery in James’ brain that makes the world seem larger and scarier and more terrible than it really is.

But really, the world _ is  _ large and scary and terrible. The universe saw fit to give James far more than anyone should have to handle. The universe decided to give James illness and to weigh him down with pain until even the simplest tasks became impossible. And Thomas can only do so much - so often he finds himself watching while James struggles to do something like brush his teeth because he can’t do  _ everything _ for him.

He can’t do everything for James and for himself as well. He feels as though if he were to touch his face parts of him would come away on his fingertips, flaky, ashy, grey. He’s used up.

He’s so empty. He’s so  _ tired. _

Thomas comes back inside and makes himself a bed on the couch. He texts James,  _ Sleeping out here tonight. I need quiet. Overstimulated. _

James doesn’t reply. That’s fine.

It’s not as though he was expecting any kindness anyway.

 

* * *

 

He wakes in the night, gets up, and crawls into bed with James.

“Hey,” he says.

James turns away.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos fuel me. chat to me at [alexangery.tumblr.com](http://alexangery.tumblr.com)


End file.
